AN UNSEEN FOE
All day Seth Upham had scarcely said a word. From dawn until dark he
had paced the hut, apparently buried deep in thought. Only his
gaunt, pitiful face revealed the extent to which he shared our
tortures.
Now for the first time in all that day, to our surprise, he spoke;
and his first words confirmed every fear we had felt for him.
"The boys ought not to make so much noise," he said. "I must speak
to the constable about it."
Matterson softly swore and shifted the bandage on his face. Gleazen
significantly looked over at me. Abe Guptil stood with his mouth
open and stared at Seth Upham.
Never boys of a New England town made such an uproar as was going on
outside. Those wails and yells and hideous drummings and trumpetings
were African in every weird cadence and boisterous hoot and clang.
Then, as if the first words had broken a way through his silence,
Seth Upham began to talk in a low, hurried voice; and however
reluctant we had hitherto been to believe that he was mad, there was
no longer any hope for him at all. The man had lost his mind
completely under the terrific strain that he had endured.
Small wonder when you think of all that had happened: of how, for
Cornelius Gleazen's mad project, he had thrown away a place of honor
and assured comfort back in Topham; of how he had been driven deeper
and still deeper into Gleazen's nefarious schemes by blackmail for
we knew not what crimes that he had committed in his young-manhood;
of how, even in that alliance of thieves, he had fallen from a place
of authority to such a place that he got not even civil treatment;
of how he had lost reputation, livelihood, money, and now even his
vessel.
"I declare, we must put in another constable," he muttered. "Johnson
can't even keep the boys in order--In order, did you say? Who else
should keep the place in order?--O Sim, if only you had wits to
match your good intentions! How can you expect to keep books if you
can't keep the stock in order?--" He stopped suddenly and faced the
door. "Hark! Who called? I declare, I thought I was a lad again."
Moment by moment, as he paced the hut, we watched his expression
change with the mood of his delirium,--sometimes I have wondered if
the fever of the tropics did not precipitate his strange
frenzy,--and moment by moment his emotions seemed to become more
intense.
Now, pursuing that latest fancy, he talked about his boyhood and
told how deeply he repented of the wicked life he had led as a young
man; told us, all unwittingly, of unsuspected ambitions that had led
him from wild ways into sober ones, and of his youthful
determination to win a creditable place in the community; told us of
the hard honest work that he had given to accomplish it. Now he
revealed the pride he had taken in all that he had succeeded in
doing and building, and--which touched me more than I can tell
you--how he had counted on me, his only kinsman, to take his place
and carry on his work. All this, you understand, not as if he were
talking to us or to anyone else, but as if he were thinking out
loud,--as indeed he was,--merely running over in his own mind the
story of his life.
Now he reverted again to his repentance for the wicked youth that he
had lived. And now, suddenly, his manner of speaking changed, and
from merely thinking aloud he burst out into wild accusation.
"The dice are loaded," he cried,--his voice was hoarse and strained
with the agonies that he, like all of us, had endured and was still
enduring,--"the dice are loaded. I'll not play with loaded dice,
Neil Gleazen!"
At that Gleazen gasped out a queer whisper.
But already Seth Upham's mind was racing away on another tack.
"Aye, loaded with the blessed weight of salvation. Didn't my old
mother, God bless her, teach me at her knee that a man's soul can
never die? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name--"
Staring at him in horror, we saw that he was not blasphemous. The
words came reverently from his weak lips. He simply was mad.
Suddenly in a high-pitched voice, he began to sing,
"Low at Thy gracious feet I bend,
My God, my everlasting friend."
He sang three stanzas of the hymn in a way that appalled every one
of those three men who of us all, I think, were least easily
appalled--indeed, I think that for once they were more appalled than
the rest of us; certainly none of them had Arnold's composure or
Abe's obvious, almost overpowering sympathy for poor Seth Upham.
Then he stopped and faced about with eyes strangely aflame. In his
manner now there was all his old imperiousness and something more,
an almost noble dignity, a commanding enthusiasm, which, whether it
came from madness alone or whether it had always been in him, got
respect even from Matterson and O'Hara.
"I am going to meet my God face to face at the throne of Judgment,"
he cried.
It was the first time in days that he had addressed us directly, and
he spoke with a fierce intensity that amazed us; then, before we
guessed what was in his disordered mind, before a man of us could
stop him, he stepped outside the door and flung his arms straight
out like a cross, and with his head thrown back marched, singing,
into the darkness.
"By Heaven!" Gleazen gasped, "he has set sail now for the port of
Kingdom Come!"
We who remained in the hut, where a spell of silence had fallen,
could hear him strongly and clearly singing as he strode down the
long, dark vista toward the spring:--
"Lo what a glorious sight appears
To our believing eyes!
The earth and seas are past away,
And the old rolling skies!"
It may seem strange to one who reads of that fearful night that we
did not rush after him and drag him back. But at the time we were
taken completely by surprise, literally stupefied by the
extraordinary climax of our days and nights of suffering and
anxiety; and even then, I think,--certainly I have later come to
believe it,--we felt in our inmost hearts that it was kinder to let
him go.
He went down the hill, singing like an innocent child. His voice,
which but a moment before had been pathetically weak, had now become
all at once as clear as silver. And still the words came back from
the tall grass by the spring, where creatures ten thousand times
worse than any crawling son of the serpent of Eden lay in wait for
him:--
"Attending angels shout for joy,
And the bright armies sing,
Mortals, behold the sacred feet;
Of your descending King."
Then the song quavered and died away, and there came back to us a
queer choking cry; then the silence of the jungle, enigmatic,
ominous, unfathomable, enfolded us all, and we sat for a long time
with never a word between us.
The wailing and drumming over the body of the dead wizard had
suddenly and completely ceased. At what was coming next, not a man
of us ventured to guess.
Gleazen was first to break that ghastly silence. "They got him," he
whispered. For once the man was awed.
"No," said Arnold Lamont, very quietly, "they have not got him.
Unless I am mistaken, his madness purged his soul of its black
stains, and he went straight to the God whose name was on his lips
when he died."
Of that we never spoke again. Some thought one thing; some, another.
We had no heart to argue it.
Poor Uncle Seth! What he had done in his youth that brought him at
last to that bitterly tragic end, perhaps no other besides Cornelius
Gleazen really knew, and Cornelius Gleazen, be it said to his
everlasting credit, never told. But for all that, I was to learn a
certain story long afterward and far away. Not one man in hundreds
of thousands pays such a penalty for blasphemous sins of his mature
years; and whatever Seth Upham had done, however dark the memory, it
had been a boy's fault, which he had so well lived down that, when
Cornelius Gleazen came back to Topham, no one in the whole world,
except those two, would have believed it of him.
In that grim, threatening silence, which enfolded us like a thick,
new blanket, we forgot our own quarrel; we almost forgot the very
cause for which we had risked, and now bade fair to lose, our lives.
We were six men, two of us wounded, three of us arrant desperadoes,
but all of us at least white of skin, surrounded by a black horde
that was able, if ever it knew its own power, to wipe us at one
blow clean off the face of the earth. Now that the terrible thing
which had just happened had broken down and done away with every
thought of those trivial enmities that fed on such unworthy motives
as desire for riches, our common danger bound us, in spite of every
antagonism, closer together than brothers. By some strange power
that cry which had come back to us when Seth Upham's song ended not
only enforced a truce between our two parties, but so brought out
the naked sincerity of each one of us, that we knew, each and all,
without a spoken word, that for the time being we could trust one
another.
Gleazen, always reckless, was the first to break the silence. From
the wall he took down a pewter mug, which the dead man they called
Bull had hung there. Pretending to pour into it wine from an
imaginary bottle, he looked across it at Arnold.
"This is not the vintage I should choose for my toast," he said with
a wry mouth, "but it must serve. Yes, Lamont, it must serve." He
raised the mug high. "In half an hour we'll be six dead men. I
drink--to the next one to go."
Arnold coolly smiled. Pretending to raise a glass and clink it
against the mug, he, too, went through the pantomime of drinking.
I was not surprised that Abe Guptil was staring at them, his lips
parted, or that his face was pale. Although drunk only in
make-believe, it was a toast to make a man think twice. I drew a
deep breath; I could only admire the coolness of the two.
Yet now and then there flashed in Arnold's eye a hint of resourceful
determination such as Gleazen probably never dreamed of, a hint of
scorn for such theatrical trickery.
We were all on our feet now, standing together in our silent truce,
when we heard for the last time that sound, so unhappily familiar,
the long-drawn wailing cry that, whenever the wizard spoke, had
preceded and followed his harangue. Coming from the dark forest
beyond the clearing, it brought home to us more vividly than ever
the ominous silence that had ensued since Seth Upham fell by the
spring. Then that familiar, accursed voice, faint but penetrating,
came from the wall of vines:--
"White man, him go Dead Land!
"White man, him go Dead Land!
"White man, him go Dead Land!"
[Illustration]